Ultimately, no matter how dressed up a shooter is with narrative, cut scenes
and interactive non player characters, the key to the game’s success is how
well it delivers on this core mechanic. Shooters are at their best when you
are runing down a long dark hallway and using your bad-ass skills to cut your
enemies to pieces.

I have a soft spot for Half-Life. The original Half-Life was the last game I
played before my current descent into addiction. It is also generally credited
with expanding the role of narrative in a shooter. The game is played as a
series of narrative episodes all told from the game engine without separate
cut scenes, and always from the point of view of the player. At its best, the
game combines this narrative style with great level design to give you at
least the sense that the story, such as it is, is just unfolding in front of
you as a result of your actions in the game. The fact that the game sort of
falls apart in its last act doesn’t really detract from the fact that
everything leading up to that point was brilliant.

After Half-Life, shooters and action games took on more elements of
interesting story telling (Halo, Max Payne) and more open ended gameplay (Far
Cry, GTA, Deus Ex). It’s now fashionable to tout interactive environments,
uncanny AI and complete freedom of gameplay as a set of holy grails that once
obtained will usher in a new age in gaming glory.

But I don’t think this is so, and I think Half-Life 2 is a small bit of proof
that I am right. Half-Life 2 is brilliant precisely because it is not open
ended, but completely linear and scripted. One minute the goons will be
chasing you over a rooftop. The next you’ll notice an open window near a ledge
and you leap in just in time to save yourself from the rush of the drone army.
You feel like a brilliant bad-ass. As the rush subsides, you realize that the
game led you there. This happens over and over again. The game has perfected a
technique that Half-Life got right once in a while, which is to take you down
a long dark hallway that is cleverly disguised as “the real world”.

Half-Life 2 builds this illusion using state of the art rendering and flawless
pacing and level design. City 17 is full of beautiful light, texture and a
palpable “sense of place.” There was never a dark hallway this pretty. The
place looks wide open, but the areas are cleverly designed to frantically
direct you in exactly one direction, which is towards the end of the mission.
You hardly ever find yourself wandering aimlessly through the game world with
no idea where to go. This is in stark contrast to, say, Halo 2, where you
could get lost even in the middle of the most frenetic action set piece.

The other tool that Half-life 2 uses to keep you running is some of the best
human character animation I’ve ever seen anywhere. Humans in the game walk,
run and fall like real people. But the faces are pure magic. Character’s
mouths move like they are really talking, and the faces really project a sense
of feeling and emotion. It’s cool how they carefully look at you as you move
around them. All of this makes you forget is that most of your interactions
with non-player characters who are not trying to kill you are completely
scripted.

The result of this design is a game that puts you right on the rails of its
story and doesn’t allow you to fall off. You run, you hide, you shoot, the
story moves forward. It’s perfection.

My only complaint is that they didn’t hire the guy that implemented Halo’s
level loading code, so your time in the game world is broken up by too many
stupid load screens.